Page 29 - December 2021

A Fine Line
Honoring the members who have stood up to Department pressure to complete the portal as everybody’s heroes
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
Holding the line leads down a hall on the third floor at 35th Street. Some Lodge 7 members, called here because they refused to fill out the portal asking for vaccination status, had to endure up to four hours waiting in this hallway. Others confided that they felt danger awaited down the hall.
Members who walked this line had already refused a supervi- sor’s request to complete the portal. FOP field reps greeted mem- bers called to 35th before being led into a room where a Depart- ment command staffer read from a script to offer another chance to comply. Refusal led them to what some described as a clos- et, where human resources awaited. It was there that they were stripped of police powers, surrendered their stars and police IDs and put into no-pay status.
But that’s not where it ended. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, members were met by gold stars in another room, where they were pressured with the same inquisition as all the previous stops.
“It was like a slaughterhouse,” Officer Elizabeth Alaniz de- scribed. With 21 years on, Alaniz works third watch in Extradition Unit 166 at 35th Street and was one of the first officers who re-
fused to fill out the portal to be called in. The Department seemed to target members who had lengthy service and had worked their way up to prime assignments. Threats, or so it seemed.
“There was a range of emotions in that hallway,” Alaniz con- tinued. “It was a sadness. It was physical sickness. We were wait- ing to get called and we talked about the injustice. Some officers were angry. Some of them were crying. Some were just sitting there, and they had this deer-in-the-headlights look. And we talk- ed about the Stockholm Syndrome.”
Make no mistake, however. The Lodge 7 members – 100 of them and counting – who have declined filling out the portal and went into, or are still in, no-pay status are the holding-the-line heroes because they will not let the Department hold its officers hostage. The other pervasive emotion filling that hallway every day since members started getting summoned there is “F--- the mandate.”
Another perspective the hold-the-liners have calls out the City and the Department for trying to enforce an unlawful order that violates every right they have under the protection of their collec- tive bargaining agreement. That is why the FOP created its Hold
CONTINUED ON PAGE 30
CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ DECEMBER 2021 29